And Now, A Note From Our Sponsors

Verizon is running an interesting campaign for their new Blackberry Storm and this blog is carrying the ad banners right now (right sidebar). You can click on a link in the banner and turn the banner into a video on the new Blackberry Storm.

This is interesting to me for several reasons. First, it’s running for two days, yesterday and today, and I believe for these two days, it’s the only campaign running on this blog. Second, it’s generating a nice chunk of change to a good cause because all the ad revenue on this blog goes to charity. And third, it’s running on a blog that was openly critical of the Storm just last week. In fact, that post which is critical of the Storm is still on the front page of this blog where the ad is running. And this blog has been no friend to wireless carriers and their abusive business models like demanding exclusives from device manufacturers.

Conversational media and conversational marketing is coming of age. Marketers are understanding that you have to be part of the conversation even if it isn’t flattering about you and your products and services. And participants in conversational media are starting to recognize that marketers and their brands have a seat at the table and a role in the conversation. In this case, they are helping to fund it (sort of).

Kudos to Verizon for understanding that you can’t control the content your campaign runs next to. And kudos to Federated Media for evangelizing conversational marketing and for putting an interesting and relevant campaign in front of this blog’s readers.